Paintings by Detour. Paintings are all MIDI devices. Most paintings are of instruments, but they really play. Literal. Selling work, which means you have to deal with robustness since the work will live in someones home.

Data Flags by Fabio Lattanzi Antinori. Huge screen print. Paint over conductive ink. People don’t think of the paper as being the electronics. Turns out to be very reliable. 6 months at the Vienna Arts Festival. Even after rolling and shipping.

Expressive Instruments by Vahakn Matossian. Musicians pushing the tech. Have to push the expression.

Doing more science communication. Working with Max Plank on showing the contents of a paper. E.g. Suprising Variety in Ageing.

Mixed mode

Tool design

Artistic Reinterpretation

Science Communication

One does not simply communicate science. Needs justification. Gloss is never enough. Fear of misrepresentation in the media. Complex papers represented through simple one liners.

Too much trust in the default tools (e.g. matlab)

Fear that a novel, unfamiliar visualizations will result in a paper being rejected.

]]>Resonate 2015 Day 1http://www.richardbanks.com/2015/04/16/resonate-2015-day-1/
Thu, 16 Apr 2015 20:19:03 +0000http://www.richardbanks.com/?p=3069Notes from Resonate 2015 Day 1 (sort of – lots of stuff had already happened but this is the official opening) in Belgrade, Serbia.

Opening presentations in the Kolarac main hall by Adam Magyar, Nicolas Nova and Jesper Kouthoofd.

I was lucky enough to be invited to be a panellist at “The Internet of Why”, an evening “salon” organized by Smart Design in London. The event started off with a viewing of Connecting: Makers, a mini-documentary on the creative community sponsored by Microsoft. Using this as fodder for our conversation, we spent the next hour and a half responding to a diverse set of questions put to us by Gordon Hui from Smart Design, covering everything from concepts of the Internet of Things, issued of privacy, the potential of wearables and more.

Today is workshop day, and I’ve been lucky enough to sit in a half day session with Stefanie Posavec, who ran a class called “Analog Algorithms”, focussed on developing ideas for data visualizations on paper. Stefanie has history with Microsoft Research Cambridge, having worked a number of years ago on a visualization of changes made by Charles Darwin to the Origin of Species. This is work she did with Greg McInerny, which ended up on display at MOMA in New York, as part of the excellent Talk To Me exhibition.

Today’s workshop took place on the 9th floor of the Walker Art Centre. We sat four to a table, with large sheets of paper in front of us, and many pens and pencils also arrayed. Definitely set up for something hands on.

Stefanie started by going over her background and portfolio. She articulated the purpose of data visualizations as giving “meaning and connection”, “subtle insight” and “truth and honesty”, and argued that by drawing on paper you exploited a “tacit knowledge” and a physicality in representation that you don’t get by jumping straight to data and code.

The rest of the session was spent sketching data visualizations that were developed in response to some sort of data set, some set of rules (that we defined) and some mix of metaphor or aesthetic choice that we brought to the problem. She emphasised this practice of making subjective communication choices, and testing them by using the raw data. Using the data you might look for stories that you would expect your visualization to reveal, or you might look for extremes, to see if your visualization could cope. She fed in ideas of using visual metaphor (plants, night sky and so on) but in such a way that it wasn’t overt.

As a warm up exercise, Stefanie read out a set of rules which allowed each of us to generate a “data selfie”. These included, for example, “if you’re female, select a purple pen, if you’re male select a green pen. Draw a series of lines in a circle where the number of lines is your age and the length of the lines equates to your height”. Going from there she threw in other rules based on eye and hair color, glasses and so on. Here’s my selfie:

From there we did a set of exercised based on a number of data sources, including a library book collection, and finally a bigger project based on weather data from the Minneapolis region.

My library data sketches:

Weather data for a month:

Good start to Eyeo. Really got my brain churning and set me up well for the rest of the festival.

]]>http://www.richardbanks.com/2014/06/10/stefanie-posavec-eyeo/feed/3Resonate 2014http://www.richardbanks.com/2014/04/07/resonate-2014-2/
Mon, 07 Apr 2014 05:34:20 +0000http://www.richardbanks.com/?p=2812I’m just travelling home from Belgrade in Serbia, where I’ve spent the last few days at Resonate. Resonate is a conference, or more like a festival, primarily attended by people doing visualization work. It’s full of great talks from a community that is very tightly networked, brought together by the equally highly networked Filip Visnjik, who also founded the website Creative Applications. Many of the talks at the event act almost like portfolio presentations that give an overview of some compelling computer graphics or interactive installations created through the development of complex systems of code and electronics. Many of the biographies of speakers at the event start with a similar sentence: “[Person A] is a programmer and artist working at the intersection of [X] and [Y]”. This emphasis on “art” as a discipline is an interesting one, since it releases many of the attendees from the obligation that we often have in our lab of having to justify their work on pragmatic grounds. Presenters can instead focus on aesthetics and abstraction. Many of the presentations cover visualization and interaction work done with other artistic disciplines such as dance or music.

Wesley Grubbs shows work for the McKnight Foundation. A data visualization made from the resume of an artist from the foundation was then hand annotated by that artist.

Below are highlights from the event, plus a little bit about my own 30 minute presentation.

Many of the best talks for me were ones that did a good job of demonstrating some insight from the work, either in terms of process or things that were learnt. Moritz Stefaner, for example, presented a really compelling analysis and set of tools looking at the selfie phenomenon, and did a great job of talking about mistakes, showing dead ends as well as clearly describing some of the outcomes suggested by the data. This work is all wrapped up in a site and set of tools entitled SelfieCity.

Moritz Stefaner argues that averaging selfies just leads to blandness, and doesn’t tell you anything particularly interesting about, in this case, images drawn from different cities.

I enjoyed the presentation by Paul Prudence. He emerged from a period of experimentation with Adobe Flash from a decade or so ago, during which he published Flash Math Creativity, which is still something of a bible for learning how to dynamically control graphics. Since then, like his peer Joshua Davis, he’s reinvented himself as an artist working in the area of “visual music”. Towards the end of his presentation he started to talk a little about his process, showing sketchbooks and more.

Paul Prudence presenting in the beautiful Gallery of the Frescoes.

Paul Prudence’s sketchbook

Paul Prudence’s overview of visual music.

Yuri Suzuki is one of many strong graduates of the Royal College of Art’s Design Products course, which he now teaches on. Like Paul, he works in the area of music, but what he produces is more playful, even tongue in cheek. His passion is the loss of the physical nature of music, and he particularly laments the passing of the LP record. His major project at the RCA was the Sound Chaser, which featured sections of LPs cut up to create “railway tracks” along which small motorized trains, fitted with record player needles, could travel. Mixing different tracks together gives you odd and unexpected burst of music. His work is full of these spontaneous inventions.

Jussi Ängeslevä from ART+COM generously shows the compelling work that he’s done with students across a broad set of themes including Computational Photography and Ready/Made.

Daito Manabe, Kyle McDonald and Klaus Obermier present their joint project – Transcranial – which they put together over the fortnight before Resonate kicked off. Shown here is a piece created by Daito that uses electrical stimulation to involuntarily drive the muscles of an actor’s face.

I was lucky enough to be pushed into doing a 30 minute presentation by Filip, which is a real honour. I think he had seen me talk at the PSFK update event last year and clearly thought I’d fit in somehow. To be honest, I was pretty hesitant, though. Resonate has a particular community which I’m not sure I’m a part of, and the kind of work we do in the lab is driven by quite different motives than much of what was on show at the event. So I was pretty nervous at the outset, which was not helped by seeing Moritz Stefaner, who I admire very much, sitting in the front row. In the event, though, it went well, I think. The room was full, people seemed curious, and I managed to communicate the diversity of what we do, reasonably well.

I have been thinking of our work in the lab as falling three categories: Pragmatic (constrained and contextual); Material (unconstrained and exploratory) Reflective (looking at the past and future). I showed some recent work we’re doing in each of these buckets: Bob Corish and teams work using Microsoft Kinect to assess the development of Multiple Sclerosis in patients as an example of the pragmatic; David Sweeney’s work making physical visualizations for the Tenison Road project as an example of Material; and some of my older work with Technology Heirlooms as more Reflective.

Here’s a PDF of my presentation. What I showed at Resonate contained videos and some transitions which this one doesn’t feature, so I’m not sure how much it makes sense, but there you go.

Resonate has a really strong, engaged and excited community and I came away buzzing from what I’d seen in a way I rarely do from other events, even South by Southwest. Hopefully I can beat the rush and attend again next year.

Wrist band

David Sweeney and Tim Regan

]]>Research Through Design Session 1 | Room 2 | Doinghttp://www.richardbanks.com/2013/09/10/research-through-design-session-1-room-2-doing/
http://www.richardbanks.com/2013/09/10/research-through-design-session-1-room-2-doing/#commentsTue, 10 Sep 2013 20:45:22 +0000http://www.richardbanks.com/?p=2639Continuing my notes from the recent Research Through Design conference in Newcastle [see opening keynote]. This is the first of the sessions I attended on Day 1. Each session was held in a small room that sat about 30 people, all around a large conference table, and featured talks by 3 or 4 of the participants who had each submitted some kind of artefact to the event. Each artefact was presented, then plenty of time was left for discussion amongst the presenters and audience, not that it felt like there was a division between the two. Each session was tied thematically, with the following talks all being connected through the “Doing” of design research.

Below are my notes from day 1 of this event, featuring biological/architectural work, code, craft and paper electronics.

Avalon Shells – like bone but different structures on different layers. Hardness on the outside. Softness on the inside.

Artefacts developed using Synth Morph – a design environment through which shape can be evolved based on cellular growth. Dictating a density pattern for the cells results in particular patterns of growth.

Artefacts represent a catalogue of shapes based on the design language that emerged from this tool. These are Material Proxies – assemblages. E,g, In artefact 1 the attractor system is placed at the centre of the object. In the second round, 3 attractor systems are placed in the artefact. Long way to go from these early objects to the complexity of a shell.

Social science looking for “texture” – small number of people in a longitudinal study.

Sian’s work (represented through a recreation of her whiteboard of notes) – trying to find an authentic attachment to her participants, rather than find a convenient representation. Uses space – looking for outliers etc. Not aesthetic. Looking for something that is actionable by other disciplines.

Tim’s code. Notions of failure in different disciplines is not the same.

Bob’s sketchbook. Very concerned with people. Jumps between high level and detail.

Up-cycling – promoting responsible design practice in the lingerie industry. Trying to change people’s view on materials for new uses.

Swimwear project – show industry that is quite conservative new processes and old techniques.

New technologies/new fabrics. Nano-tech etc. Quite fascinating, but construction really matters. What can you MAKE out of these new technologies. Marrying old techniques with new tech. Making a glove the way they would have in Tudor times.

Set a brief of design for future space travel. Space gloves. Both have to be long-lived, and also part of a long journey where people will need stuff to do.

Looking back at vintage astronaut wear they were clearly influenced by fashion of the time, not just the technology.

Using a glove to test tailoring during the project. A Microcosm of the human body – how it bends and moves. A starting point from where new tailoring and joining tech could be applied.

Not much information in general about gloves. So prototyped based on V&A original. Old gloves don’t have the gussets between the fingers etc. Hadn’t been invented yet. Had to experiment with pattern cutting to get it to really fit the hand. A specific hand.

Eventually honed a pattern that helped teach how a hand works.

Tailors and plastic surgeons DO meet because tailors have such a good understanding of how to cut for the body.

Work still feels rooted in online graphics and interfaces. Trying to find paper-equivalents of electronic things.

3 versions of the invitation from literal to abstract, set to challenge the visitor to think about the electronics.

General discussion

To Tim:

Examples of thickening from Social Science – how sometimes visiting Facebook is like glancing out of a window.

Objects are at different scale. Harder to get an overview from the printout of the program.

How do we make code readable by real people (Jon Rogers). Tim disagrees. Such a gulf between the way the technology works and what it does. Discussion about whether Raspberry Pi is good or not. Can visual programming languages (e.g. Max) scale to big problems.

Is Sian a psychologist? Now much more ethnographic end of sociology.

To Carolina:

What was the starting material for these things? 3d Printing – powder and glue.

Is the goal a design tool for creating objects? Changes in the microscopic level can create effects in the macroscopic. In design we have intent and have to tweak materials to get what we want. With this project the process of design is part of the material because its alive. The seed.

Background in architecture – how do you collaborate with other disciplines. The more you get into a science the more you see the specialization. Different language between a microbiologist and a developmental biologist.

Issues of scale. Material proxies because the things we’re looking at occur at small scales, but are being explored at larger scales.

To Janine

How does the fact that this is research change the kind of things you’re doing. Doing research makes you analyse things that you would have taken for granted. Being asked to engage in research, but we’re design practitioners.

Aim is to do something interesting about the future, but couldn’t move on without looking at the past.

To Mike

How do the shoes you’re wearing affect the noise? The earthing process is affected by the soles.

Is the black box necessary? Could have the electronics locally.

]]>http://www.richardbanks.com/2013/09/10/research-through-design-session-1-room-2-doing/feed/1Things We’ve Learnt About…Search and Web Usehttp://www.richardbanks.com/2013/03/12/things-weve-learnt-aboutsearch-and-web-use/
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:59:15 +0000http://www.richardbanks.com/?p=2587We have a new issue of the “Things We’ve Learnt About…” magazine, a regular publication we release each issue of which summarizes the research work of the Socio-Digital Systems team around a particular theme. This one is all about “Search & Web Use” and has been primarily authored by Richard Harper and Sian Lindley, with a LOT of hard work by Nick Duffield, who did all the design work on it.

The digital version is available for free, or you can buy a printed version if you want (they’re really nicely printed, but done print-on-demand so are a little pricey – we don’t make any money from them).

This issue is a summary of the SDS “Beyond Search” theme, focussing on Sian’s “5 Web Modes”, and showcasing various projects that have come out of the work, including Seeds, Cards and our work with Aalto University on “Domesticating Search”. I’m pretty proud of this magazine series, and this is another great issue for us to give out both internally and externally, to showcase what we do.

As a reminder, there are now three issues of the magazine, on Communication, Memory and Search. All of them are available from the here.

]]>RCA Degree Show 2012 & Microsoft Design Expohttp://www.richardbanks.com/2012/08/03/rca-degree-show-2012-microsoft-design-expo/
Fri, 03 Aug 2012 13:53:35 +0000http://www.richardbanks.com/?p=2546Microsoft holds an annual design competition for students from around the world who are usually studying either interaction or product design. It’s called the Design Expo. Students work in groups at their school, usually over the spring semester, to a brief that we set and they then select their best team, who travel to Redmond, Microsoft’s home, to present what they’ve done to an audience of employees.

I had a preview of the RCA student work earlier in the year, then we picked the two projects to send to Redmond, which were shown at the colleges degree show in early July, before heading to the US. Rather than taking place at the RCA’s “head office” near the Albert Hall, this year the Design Interactions students showed their work over the river at Battersea in a very cool creative space called Testbed 1.

The first of the two student projects we picked for Design Expo was The Superstitious Fund by Shing Tat Chung. Shing has developed a fully working investment fund, but one who’s algorithms for buying and selling are based on superstition. It primarily uses numerology, looking for example for lucky and unlucky numbers, as well as phases of the moon, to decide when to buy and sell. The amazing thing abut this project is that it is fully working. It is trading live on the stock market, has £4000 pounds worth of investment put it in by people from around the world, and includes a contract, stock certificate and every other legal requirement.

This is a classic example of the schools critical approach to design. It both forces us to think about the random nature of the stock market, for example, or the illogical sense that people have of numbers and data, while at the same time being very real.

Shing had a trade board mounted at the degree show, showing live data for the fund. He also presented some of his other projects which all look at superstition and illogicality.

The second student project which went to Redmond was Neil Usher’s beautiful Pareidolic Robot. Related to Shing’s project, Neil’s interests are in human’s capacity to look for shapes, meaning and data in our surroundings where there often isn’t any. According to Wikipedia “Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.”

Neil built a fully working robotic system, which uses face recognition to look at clouds. He’s got a lovely selection of images that the robot has found, many of which are face like. The robot is beautifully engineered, with two cameras that look like eyes, and can reorient themselves on the end of stalks.

Again, this is a fully realised object, but one that asks questions about our past times, and what it means to do idle activities. Do we feel so much pressure to use all of our time “efficiently” that we might have to give over the pleasures in our lives, like cloud spotting, to some piece of technology?

So that’s the two pieces of work that went to the design expo. You can see the other participants work here. Neil and Shing did a great job compressing their joint presentation down to 10 minutes. Hopefully the video will be up soon.

A few other pieces of work stood out for me from the RCA Degree Show. Here’s some shots:

]]>Central Saint Martins Degree Show 2012http://www.richardbanks.com/2012/06/23/central-saint-martins-degree-show-2012/
Sat, 23 Jun 2012 07:22:41 +0000http://www.richardbanks.com/?p=2450My phone shots from the CSM show this year, in their cool new King’s Cross building. Most of these are from the Textile Futures program, which was, as usual, really thought provoking.

Project from the TEXTILES FUTURES MA students. I’ve managed to link these mysterious looking shots to their project pages up on the course homepage. They’ve been pretty smart, and made dedicated project pages for each, which hopefully they’ll keep alive now that the students have graduated.

Here’s a few other bits and bobs, including a rather prominent example of the New Aesthetic.

]]>“The Things We Keep” by Christian Svaneshttp://www.richardbanks.com/2011/08/15/the-things-we-keep-by-christian-svanes/
Mon, 15 Aug 2011 07:06:48 +0000http://www.richardbanks.com/?p=2297Christan Svanes video of objects and their history is a simple piece of work that reminds me of Berg’s visualizations or the great experiments and ideas from the Oslo School of Architecture and Designs “Touch” project (particularly this one). This idea that objects can hold their history, and through that keep us in touch with out past, is one that I find really compelling, and is obviously related to my interest in digital heirlooms. It’s also being explored through projects like “Tales of Things”, using RFID tags to connect objects to their data.